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KIRKUS REVIEW

In Collison’s (Star-Crossed, 2006, etc.)
YA adventure, a teen on a character-building excursion at sea faces challenges
larger than getting along with his crewmates when the spirit of a destructive
ancient Chinese ghost appears.

James McCafferty has the bad luck to be
shanghaied by his mother and her boyfriend and sent aboard the Chinese junk Good
Fortune. He is not a happy sailor. While the other teens possess what might
pass as conventional behavior problems—the bookish boy obsessed with weapons,
the tattooed punk girl, the adopted Asian kleptomaniac, the bully and his
minions—James is different. He isn’t a bad kid; he just sees and hears dead
people, who now pursue the Good Fortune as it wanders to the middle of
the Pacific Ocean. Yu Chin, the spirit of a 700-year-old Chinese eunuch in the
imperial court, talks to James, berates him as a weakling, then tells him his
plan to take over his body and send him to hell. Until then, readers’ are
treated to plenty of irreverent Holden Caulfield–like wit along with James’ spot-on
observations, which seem to keep him afloat as the situation takes on water.
When the chipper youth counselor Marty—“a continuous public service
announcement”—and first mate Miles disappear and Capt. Dan, who “looks more
like somebody’s fat, stoned uncle,” dies, the ship is inexorably drawn toward a
fate that involves a parallel spirit world and an ancient Chinese power
struggle. The abandoned teens don’t become as feral as those in The Lord of the
Flies; instead, their camaraderie comes in handy just as a ghost armada
raises itself from the deep. Much interesting information on Chinese sailing
ships and mythology is introduced, and while not all of it is essential to the
plot, Collison deftly prevents the info from talking down to young readers or
encumbering the story.

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